


Resonance

by pendrecarc



Category: Master and Commander - All Media Types
Genre: Confessions, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Music, Pining
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-23
Updated: 2018-11-23
Packaged: 2019-08-21 21:35:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,521
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16584629
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pendrecarc/pseuds/pendrecarc
Summary: Jack and Stephen come full circle.





	Resonance

**Author's Note:**

  * For [SweetSorcery](https://archiveofourown.org/users/SweetSorcery/gifts).



He found the ’cello early in his friendship with Jack Aubrey, in a small shop in Lisbon; in a bookseller and antiquary’s, which was reached by means of a narrow alley off one of the steep and winding streets, and into which he and Jack wandered quite by chance. Stephen was looking for a particular volume that described among other things the breeding habits of _Haematopus moquini_ and their peculiar dances of courtship. He had held just such a book in his own hands not a year before, and had ever since been castigating himself for failing to remember so much as the title or the author’s name—except that he was quite certain it had been in Portuguese. He had just turned away in disgust from one of the bookcases when his eye fell on the instrument, lying on its side against one of the interior walls. It did not look like much at a distance; the finish had no particular lustre and the scrollwork no particular finesse, but his eye was attracted to it nevertheless.

Stooping awkwardly down to reach it—it was quite hemmed in by a wrought iron hat-stand and a handsome old chest of, if he was not much mistaken, Malayan craftsmanship—Stephen rapped his fingers lightly on the smooth wood just beneath the fingerboard. The sound it produced was nicely resonant, even in a room so ill-suited for good acoustics. He set it upright, and after running his right palm along its curving side as one might soothe a horse he plucked the G-string with his other hand. It was not so badly out of tune as one might have expected, and produced a note of surprising richness.

Having secured the permission of the shop’s owner, and the use of a bow from the small supply of musical instruments and their ephemera scattered throughout the place, Stephen perched himself atop the Malayan chest and began to adjust the tuning pegs, and then to play in earnest.

He stopped, in surprise and great pleasure, almost the moment the bow caught the string. “Oh!” Stephen said aloud, quite forgetting to hide his enthusiasm under the expectant eye of the proprietor, “how extraordinary.” The quick, light scale that followed seemed to leap from the instrument almost without effort; and running his calloused thumb along the fingerboard he was struck by the sweetness of the sound even in the higher registers.

Jack appeared then, as responsive to the sound of strings as the gunroom ever was to the drum beating ‘Heart of Oak’. “What have you found, Stephen?”

“The most wonderful thing. Just listen here, Jack.” And he descended from the highest to the lowest notes in a series of arpeggios in D major, ending on a note so perfectly resonant that it hummed not only through the ‘cello itself but in the air between them; glancing up at his friend, Stephen saw his own delight reflected back in that broad and open face, blue eyes bright as the sea. In the short time Stephen had known Captain Aubrey, that look of pure pleasure had become familiar, even commonplace, yet no less dear to him for its ordinariness. Stephen felt something stir in his own chest in response, a string vibrating to a sympathetic tone.

The proprietor was explaining that his brother-in-law, a music master, came by the shop every week to keep the instruments in trim, and that this ‘cello was a favorite of his. Stephen nodded along abstractedly, his attention wholly divided between Jack and the instrument itself.

“Why, she is a marvel!” Jack cried, when the quick flow of Portuguese came to an end. “Sings like an angel, though she don’t look like much. Try that bit of the Boccherini, Stephen, if you will—you know the part I mean. By God, I wish I had my fiddle.”

She showed the Boccherini to great advantage, and the phrases of the Vivaldi double concerto which he attempted next; when Stephen at last looked up from his bow he was in love, and Jack was enraptured. Remembering too late that he might wish to bargain, Stephen schooled his features and asked, as casually as he could, after the price. The sum named made his heart sink and Jack, whose grasp of French at least was quite firm on the numbers, start in protest. “No,” Stephen said with regret to the proprietor, “that is much too dear.” And “No,” again to Jack, “it is worth every _centavo_ , and I shall not be able to argue him down to the change in my pocket.” For he had glanced inside the soundhole and seen the name of the eminent Italian house printed there; and having played the thing, he was willing to believe it genuine. He allowed himself one more long, lingering passage to wring every bit of beauty he could from the experience, and then with a sigh of real regret laid the instrument back down.

“You must remember the place,” Jack said that night; they had sailed with the tide, and the Madeira in their glasses rocked to and fro with the motion of the ship (for even if they were out of funds for fine instruments, Jack had declared, he would refuse to allow that they were out of funds for fine wines). “If we have good hunting,” he said, reaching as he did so to touch the great central beam that ran low across his cabin ceiling, “then we’ll come back sooner or later, and you may buy it with your share of the prize-money.”

Stephen shook his head, smiling down at his own battered ’cello. “I have a faithful companion here, you know; and one that has served me well enough this far. Besides, what if I bought the thing and it was lost in a gale, or dashed to pieces by the enemy guns? I don’t think I could ever forgive myself. No, we shall run on very happily just as we are.”

“Well, I suppose that is wiser of you,” said Jack, though he sounded more disappointed than Stephen himself. “But I should have loved a duet with it. I should like to know how it sounds here in this cabin.”

“As should I, my dear, but we must not repine for what is lost. Not when there is music to be played.” And, having disposed of the last of the Madeira: “Come now; let us try the Boccherini again, together this time.” They had played it so often Stephen had no need of the score, and kept his eye instead on Jack’s face, ostensibly to keep them better in time but mostly because the music was always more beautiful to him when he heard it through Jack’s ears. Stephen felt again that sympathetic resonance in his heart, and knew as he did so the danger he ran, and tamped it down as he would still an errant string.

***

Stephen was a young man then, his hands and his heart both unbroken; those disasters were still to come, as was Junot’s march on Lisbon, the whole Peninsular War with the occupation of Stephen’s own beloved Catalonia, and a hundred thousand other matters more important than whether a Naval surgeon should own an instrument that had caught his eye. There was Jack’s heart to be given and broken, too; his fortune to be made and lost and made again, on land and at sea.

They ran on well together, often happily, sometimes not; circled the world time and again; and came back around, as so often happens, to that same port of Lisbon on a calm summer’s night, too late to come into dock and find lodging.

They had not meant to spend long there, no longer than was needed to refit and resupply, but Jack—now Admiral Aubrey—had taken a great splinter to the side just through the Straits of Gibraltar, and it was not healing as Stephen would have liked, so as the ship’s physician he declared it was the Admiral himself who was most in need of refitting. Jack cursed Stephen roundly for it, and cursed the gun that had kicked with such unexpected violence, and himself for being too slow on his feet to duck out of the way—and subsided only when Stephen lost his own temper. “You’re not a boy anymore, Jack!” he cried, in tones that gave even Killick pause. “You cannot expect to bounce right up from a wound like this in a day, or even a week; you may expect to be feeling it for at least a month. Now lie back, for all love, and do as I say; or would you have it be known that an Admiral of the Blue caught his death while exercising his own guns?”

So Jack lay back, and did as he was told, and even said “Thank’ee, Stephen” almost meekly as he swallowed the laudanum that was measured out exactly to the drop; and as his eyelids began to droop Stephen let out a great breath of frustration and anxiety and dropped into the chair beside him.

“There,” he said, with as much firmness and finality as he could muster in his exhaustion, for there had been high demand for his services on this voyage and this last patient had brought him close to the ragged edge. “Now rest, and we shall see whose orders are followed here.” He did not like the damp sheen of Jack’s brow, but leaning forward to lay his hand against it found it was not so warm as he had feared. “Now rest,” he said again in softer tones, and allowed himself this much, to brush the hair back from where it had stuck in sweat-soaked strands: bright butter-yellow, and grizzled grey, and more now of the latter than he had realized. “There.”

“Stephen,” said Jack at length, as one half asleep. “Are you still there?”

“Where else, my dear?”

“I’m a damned scrub, Stephen, with no sense of gratitude, and you may feel free to tell me so.”

“You are a damned tribulation as a patient, Jack; that much I will allow.” He said it with all the tenderness of which his harsh and creaking voice was capable, knowing it would be heard.

“It is only,” Jack said, opening his eyes to reveal a blue filmed over with the drugs and fatigue, “that it is such an inconvenience, and just now when there is so much to be done! Do you ever have the feeling of time slipping away, and nothing to show for it but sand in the bottom of the glass?”

“I dislike like this melancholy, Jack; I dislike it extremely. Less for what it says of your physical state, you understand, and more for the unfortunate poetical effect it seems to have on the mental. Come, now, you have had a bad time of it, but you are not descended so far into age and decrepitude: you have a hearty year or two in you yet.” Jack’s eyes slipped shut, too weary for the barb to penetrate, but still he did not sleep: the lines of his face were heavy with pain and preoccupation. Stephen went on, more softly, “I need hardly remind you of your accomplishments, in either the professional or the personal realm. What is this ‘nothing to show’?”

“Oh, I don’t mean anything for the world to see.” This was scarcely more than a murmur, so Stephen had to lean in to hear it. “It is only that there are things I have wanted, and ain’t had the courage to ask for; and here I am at the culmination of my career, and I might say of my life, and if I asked now—ah, damn and blast. Leave me be.”

“Never in life. Come out with it, Jack—the body heals poorly when the mind cannot rest.”

“It’s only,” Jack said, reaching up to catch the fingers still gently stroking his brow, “that I wonder sometimes how much longer we’ll be afloat together, and what will become of us after.”

Stephen’s hand had been engulfed in Jack’s hundreds, perhaps thousands of times in their decades together; he could not recall the last time the casual gesture had tightened his throat and set his pulse beating in a hard tattoo. “Sure you will have more than enough to occupy you in retirement, between the children—and it may be grandchildren by then—and your astronomical interests.”

“And what will you do then, in a quiet English retirement? Write your next monograph on the common partridge?” And Jack turned Stephen’s hand in his, and brought it to his lips; he held it there only a moment before he let it slide from his grip, but it was a moment too long and too speaking to be shrugged off, and it stopped Stephen’s breath. “Lord, Stephen,” Jack said, “how tired I am,” and moments later was asleep.

Stephen himself sat as though rooted to the gently-swaying boards, staring at the hand that had been kissed. He felt there ought to be a mark upon it. Indeed there were many: the missing nails, the slight bend of the first and third finger that would never leave him, the callouses of ‘cello strings and surgical instruments, the minute nicks and grooves left by handling wildlife. But no visible sign of Jack Aubrey, whose mysteries Stephen thought he had observed and catalogued in all areas but one, with whom he had shared every source of joy and sorrow in their lives but one. Of whom he had thought there was nothing left to discover. “ _Et omnia vanitas_ ,” he told himself, shaking his head at first at his own arrogance, and then in wonder. And with much to occupy his thoughts he took himself to bed, where against all probability he found a deep and untroubled sleep.

He woke early. Jack, for once, did not, but after assuring himself it was the much-needed sleep of a healing man Stephen was more glad of this than otherwise. Much as he wished for Jack’s company, much as it was necessary to speak with him in daylight with their heads both clear, Stephen found he desired his own counsel more, and to have some space for his thoughts. After leaving his orders that Jack was not to be disturbed until he woke of his own volition, he asked to be put ashore. This granted, he had his coffee and bacon in a fine cafe overlooking the harbor, then wandered the streets, enjoying the snatches of melodic Portuguese that came to his ear as much as the sight of an osprey wheeling overhead. As he walked, he considered to himself whether some gifts might be offered late in life, and whether they might be all the sweeter for the long delay.

And then, passing the mouth of a narrow alley, he stopped in his tracks and laughed his creaking laugh. With a hasty apology to the housewife walking behind him, whom he had nearly startled into dropping her morning’s shopping, he crossed the street and went inside.

Many hours later, upon returning to the ship, he was pleased to find Jack awake but not moving about; he had set himself up at his desk to deal with the mountain of paperwork that was the Admiral’s lot and to take reports from his officers, and he looked up at Stephen’s entrance with an uncharacteristic hesitation that told Stephen he had not forgotten the laudanum-soaked conversation of the night before. “Better today, I see,” Stephen said briskly, setting the tone to a professional one, and satisfying himself as to Jack’s fever (gone), his pain (negligible), his appetite (considerable), and the state of his bowels (adequate, and be damned to my bowels, Stephen). This dealt with, Stephen looked toward the door from which the first lieutenant had just left; and in quite a different voice he asked, “Are you quite at leisure, my dear?”

“I think so,” Jack said with a strange mixture of eagerness and guardedness. “Much as I ever am. What is it you have to say?”

“Not to say, but to show you. A moment.” And disappearing for no more than the promised moment into the smaller cabin he called his own, he came out again with a large but not very heavy wooden case, still slung ‘round with the many ropes with which Stephen had insisted it be hauled gently, ever so gently, up the side. He made awkward work of the knots, so Jack pushed his hands aside and finished the task for him. “Look here, Jack, do you remember?” And opening the case, Stephen raised his eyes from the dull and unlovely wood to Jack’s face, and saw in the dawning realization the shadow of a much younger man: just as beaten by weather, but less so by life; and Stephen’s heart was glad of it.

“Good lord, Stephen—I had quite forgot it! She ain’t the same one, is she?”

“The very same. I had forgotten her as well; except I happened to be passing the shop where we found her, and remembered it after all those years. The ‘cello had been sold,” he went on, raising the instrument from its case as he spoke, “but I inquired as to the buyer, and was given his address. God bless the memory of an antiquarian. The owner was loath to part with it, but I wore him down.” The full tale was a sadder one, of a beloved son greatly gifted with music but less so with luck in the war. The still-grieving parent had preferred in the end not to let the instrument lie unplayed and gathering dust. Stephen said nothing of this; he would not for the world have dimmed the joy in Jack’s eyes. “It will need new strings, I think; these are a little sour. I will change them out tonight. But otherwise the sound is as pure as I remember.”

“Change them out at once, Stephen, if you will! I am with child to hear her again.”

So the spare strings were fetched, and the cumbersome task of replacing them accomplished, and when they were tuned Stephen placed his bow upon the string and found himself suddenly at a loss. Jack had made no move for his own instrument; Stephen felt oddly exposed, and reached in his nakedness not for any of the pieces they had often played together but for one of the scores Jack had found him so long ago; a slow movement from a dance suite for solo ‘cello, in the key of E-flat. It was a curious choice of key, he had always thought; more awkward on this particular instrument than some, ill-calculated to set the strings ringing in perfect agreement, the one with the other. He felt this was a piece that asked him to work for it, to draw out the beauty of the sound through the force of his will. The ‘cello responded as he reached for it, lending a richness to the deeper tones, a melancholy to the minor chords and an aching joy to the major, that he had never managed before.

He was out of practice on this particular piece. The double-stops sat awkward under his hand, and there were more than a few sour notes. But when he let fall his bow from the last, lingering note and looked up into Jack’s face, the blue eyes were dangerously bright.

“Lord, Stephen,” he said, voice as rough as when he came down from the deck in a heavy gale. “Ain’t she a beauty.”

“She is,” Stephen agreed, hand tightening briefly on the slender neck. “I am quite fortunate to have found her again—quite blessedly fortunate. One might almost call it Providential. I was thinking, Jack, after I left you last night—be still, and let me finish—” for Jack had stirred as though to speak—“of the young men we were, and the time we had left to us then, and whether I would those years back again if that were in my power.”

“And would you?” asked Jack, his eyes fixed on Stephen.

“I would not; I prefer not to think of it as time wasted, you know. Perhaps there are things I would like to undo, having done them. And things I wish I had done. But there are other things I would not give up to have those years back, and even if that were not true I am glad to know myself now, as I am—and gladder still to know you.” That bright gaze did not waver, even as Stephen faltered beneath it. He knew himself to be blushing. “Jack, for all love, I am no Leander; teach me to swim.”

“Stephen,” Jack said, voice still rough and now quite low, and bending down Jack caught him in a kiss; the sleeve of his coat caught the lowest string, and pressed in close Stephen heard its mate shudder and sigh in response, and felt his heart take up the tune.


End file.
